CEO Of Largest U.S. Bank Jamie Dimon Predicts AI-Driven 3.5-Day Work Week

Live to be 100, don’t get cancer, and a 3.5-day work week — that’s the quality of life JP Morgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon predicts for future generations thanks to artificial intelligence — even if some jobs get lost along the way.

“Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of Technology,” Dimon said in a Bloomberg TV interview Monday. “And literally they’ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.”

Dimon has said AI is critical to his company’s future success. JP Morgan advertised between February and April for 3,500 AI-related roles, according to data from consultancy Evident.

“The way to think about it for us is every single process, so errors, trading, hedging, research, every app, every database, you can be applying AI,” Dimon said. “So it might be as a copilot, it might be to replace humans — AI is doing all the equity hedging for us for the most part. It’s a little bit of everything.”

Dimon devoted an entire section of his shareholder letter to AI, saying AI was “an absolute necessity,” Bloomberg reported.

AI may replace some jobs, but that’s always been the case with new Technology, Dimon said. He identified other negatives of AI — “you know, planes crash, pharmaceuticals get misused.” But the biggest one, in his view, is that AI is “being used by bad people to do bad things.”

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Goldman Sachs predicts that about 300 million jobs will be lost to AI, and around a quarter of the U.S. workforce is worried.  One in five U.S. workers have a job with “high exposure” to artificial intelligence, according to Pew Research Center. It’s unclear if AI would enhance or displace these roles.

While it’s true that new Technology often destroys existing jobs, it also creates many new possibilities through different channels, according to Richard N. Cooper, the Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics at Harvard University.

If goods become cheaper, people want more of them, and demand increases, Cooper said in a 2018 McKinsey & Company podcast interview. “We’ve discovered that total employment has increased over the years in spite of concerns … about the loss of jobs created by new Technology.”

Dimon has long been “a fierce advocate of long-established career norms” such as working in the office, and a longtime critic of remote and hybrid arrangements. JPMorgan employees were called back to the office starting in September 2020. In April 2023, the bank sent a memo asking its managing directors to work from the office for five days a week, MSNBC reported.

Generative AI and other emerging technologies could automate the tasks that take up 60-to-70 percent of employees’ time, adding $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy each year, McKinsey said in a June report.

A British study by the University of Cambridge found that 61 organizations offering four-day work weeks reported a 65 percent reduction in sick days with 71 percent of employees saying they had reduced burnout. As a result, 92 percent of the companies in the program said they’d be sticking with a three-day weekend.

JP Morgan hires 30,000 people a year, Dimon said while discussing his bank’s acquisition of the failed First Republic Bank in May 2023. “At First Republic we’ve offered jobs to 90 percent of people,” he said. “…some of those jobs are transitory. But we hire 30,000 people a year, so we expect to be able to get them a job somewhere local in a different branch or a different function if we can do that. We’ll be doing that with any dislocation that takes place as a result of AI.”

More than half of U.S. employers offer a four-day workweek, or plan to, according to a June 2023 survey by ResumeBuilder.com, a website for job-seekers. A poll of 976 Business leaders found that 20 percent of employers already have a four-day workweek and another 41 percent said they plan to offer one on a trial basis. 

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